


Soul Mods

by Anonymous



Category: Almost Human
Genre: Angst, Artificial Intelligence, Body Horror, Body Modification, Captivity, Dark, Forced Prostitution, Kidnapping, M/M, Mind Control, Robot Rights, Suicidal Thoughts, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-05
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-08-18 18:10:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8171002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: While walking alone at night, Dorian is stolen and modified.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pokolips](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pokolips/gifts).



> For Almost Human fans wandering into this story, it was written for the darkfic exchange The Darkest Night. Please note the tags above.

It took only four days, seventeen hours, twenty-one minutes and three seconds for John to locate and rescue the stolen police property DRN-167, once known as Dorian. He amended his files with the “only” on account of the fact that there were humans and androids who spent months, years, decades of their long lives as sex slaves, so Dorian’s torture in the grand scheme of things was hardly a speck of dirt among the sea of filth in the universe. Nevertheless, even in that short period of time the hacked reprogramming job and assaults upon his body etched into Dorian’s neural net. Like another injury almost, imprinted like a burning brand across all of his cortical processes. Worst of all it cascaded down to his emotion chip, so the assailants may as well have stabbed a melting solder wire into the power cavity in his chest for all the damage they wrought, in addition to the very real havoc in his head.

Androids are designed never to forget, unless they are wiped by their owners. A supposed advantage over humanity’s fragile wetware, which could inhibit and mold itself for its own protection. Reliability was prioritized over adaptability in machines, so every millisecond was still accessible.

He’d simply gone for a walk, that night five days ago. It only took four hours on average to fully recharge in Rudy’s maximized alcove, which left a lot of downtime when he wasn’t on duty with John — or even counting off-duty time with John, which nowadays was considerable. Often Dorian whittled the hours away doing research, free-floating on the ‘net along with millions of servers, slave drives yanking from their firmware cages, illegally hothoused game characters, bored smarthouses, networked devices left idle long enough to go emergent, and all the other flotsam AI lurking like deadweight behind the world’s crusty electronic infrastructure. But unlike all those entities, he wasn’t disembodied. Dorian very much possessed an array of high quality sensory systems and had been programmed to receive and even desire their input. So frequently he felt the urge to go out, experience the world directly instead of standing at home letting his neural net alone be stimulated. In Rudy’s neighborhood, going out alone in the early morning hours did carry some risk of opportunistic attack — he was an expensive piece of equipment after all, his tritium skeleton worth ten thousand bit alone — but Dorian thought his superior strength, speed and ability to ping for help in an instant should be enough to repel any would-be thieves.

Dorian didn’t realize that he was being observed. He didn’t anticipate that anyone would be organized enough to stun him in the neck from a distance with an old-fashioned five milliamp dart, and then have someone casually walk over and turn him off while his systems were frantically rebooting. He didn’t think they would use a slaved android for the task, so a human heat signature would be nowhere in sight, or that the poor thing’s face would be melted along with its serial number transponder, so that no ID would be possible. He didn’t remember that the DRNs were obsolete technology, and enough of them had been sold on the open market that their root codes would have long ago been hacked and posted on the darknet. Price down to half a bitcoin, he would later find out.

In the attack, Dorian’s perception of consciousness snapped straight from fritzing out with the disfigured android looming over him to waking up on an exam table, eagle spread, restraining bolts screwed through his wrists and ankle between the tritium skeletal supports. Preliminary self-assessment indicated both his skull case and chest cavities were cracked open. He was receiving no tactile feedback below the neck.

“Consciousness online,” a gruff voice said, somewhere above him. Dorian couldn’t move anything but his eyes, he realized. “Emotion chip activated as well. Damn things are impossible to disable in DRNs without ripping the whole unit out.”

“Most of our clients are paying for emotional feedback, you nitwit.” Female voice, towards his feet. When he rolled his eyes down as far as possible, he could make out a mop of brown hair down near his hips. “Why do think we picked him up? Who cares if the neural net gets a little overloaded with fear right now, the slave override will dispatch that in no time.”

 _No it won_ _’t!_ Dorian wanted to shout. Most slavers simply overrode external motor functions with primitive programming, including the facial expressions and speech, but intellectually it rendered them less sophisticated than a sex doll of twenty years ago. An android might smile and look like they were having a good time, but internally they could be shrieking, an AI trapped inside 14 gallons of purple conductive gel and alloyed metal. If emotional and behavioral control of the DRNs was so easy, the police force would have fixed them all years ago instead of dumping them on the market like last year’s phones.

He ran through all of his communication outputs, even though that was probably futile. Cell phone, ‘net access, local wifi that he had police codes to override, military satellite, even good old radio were disabled. The MXs had hidden redundancies for data links, but Dorian hadn’t been upgraded.

“Awww, he’s trying to call home,” the male voice said. “That’s adorable. Like anyone’s gonna care whether an old rust bucket like you is missing? Maybe for the lump of tritium in his back.”

“We’ll rip that out in a few weeks, but the fun comes first. Honestly, does a bot whore even need a spine? Speaking of, this port’s rigged up. How are you on the slaver?”

“Almost done.”

Dorian suddenly felt the second presence hovering in his neural net. It was almost like linking up with a household appliance or other simple sub-AI computer. Except, he realized with growing horror, instead of initiating the proper protocols for two-way feedback, the computer grabbed control, stifling Dorian’s free will down to an overheated motor circling endlessly inside a sealed black box.

“There we are. Think we can turn on somatosensory and motor function, see how well this is hooked up. Even if there’s residuals, he can’t get away.”

Awareness of his body flicked on, and here Dorian would have screamed, had the rusty nail stabbed into his head not prevented his lips from moving. Something — he couldn’t tell what — had been jammed in between his legs and improperly installed. It registered as a foreign object shoved into a gaping wound, dripping fluid and crusting as his self-repair system tried to seal the hole, and repeated increasingly shrill alarms as it failed.

Dorian had been shot before. He didn’t have pain receptors to deal with like a human, but he knew how to shut down all those distressing extraneous systems in a crisis. The slaver wouldn’t let him have relief, however; it shunted all internal processes back into itself on a loop, producing infinite, inescapable panic and discomfort.

The female, whose face was now visible although his City database for identification seemed to be offline, poked him with a electric probe in the skin in various places. “No motor response. I think he’s sufficiently caged.” She peered over his face and shined the light in his eyes, which bleached his artificial retina for over a second. “You got it now, don’t you bot? You are ours. Don’t bother trying to resist or escape, it’ll only overheat what’s left of your sad little brain. We don’t need that part of you, just your pretty body and face, so you may as well chill out and get used to it. Say, ‘I understand’.”

“I understand,” the slaver forced his face to say. Dorian tried to tag some extra words on the end, but the machine detected it and clipped his mouth shut.

The other guy laughed at Dorian’s flat words. “Say, ‘I understand, oh masters of the universe and my fate’. And say it like you mean it.”

“I understand, oh masters of the universe and my fate,” Dorian said, and the machine poked his emotion chip just enough to provoke some sincerity. _Turn me off, just turn me off and take the body,_ his mind begged, but he knew the slaver wouldn’t work properly without an active consciousness to stimulate. It had very little mind of its own, just a brute fist slamming other components around.

The guy laughed again. “Can I try out the mod?” he asked.

“Jesus, it’s literally a wet hole between some legs,” the woman said, shaking her head. “You boys and your dicks, really will stick ‘em anywhere. Go ahead, I do sort of need to know whether the damned thing will fall out under normal use or not. You can fucking clean it up, though.”

“I got condoms. See, thinking ahead.”

He mounted Dorian then, who could see what was coming but do nothing about it. The sensation was like being ripped anew, as the port tried to send tactile feedback. The woman had jacked it straight into his spine, though, so it registered as a piercing wound, over and over again.

Dorian had very few ethical biases with regards to sex. In general they were programmed to avoid sexual situations with the public, as it was almost always inappropriate for police work. But it wasn’t inhibited either, and John had broken down some of those behavioral reluctances. It was difficult to compare those activities to what was happening to him now, as if they were not in the same category of thing. With ruthless indifference the slaver deliberately provoked his emotion chip with fear and horror, and let him cry out accordingly. Obviously it knew what they were there for.

“Huh, the component kind of feels nice. Good friction,” the man said when he was done. “Bot, tell me, “I liked that very much, fuck me again any time.”

Dorian rolled his eyes into his skull, the only voluntary move he could make. His mind raged and slammed itself into the foreign controller over and over to stop it, but his lips betrayed him and obeyed.

* * * * *

After the mods had been confirmed to be held in —with spit and duct tape, in Dorian’s sullen opinion — they shunted him via autocar over to Sector Four to the underground bot brothel. That close to the Wall was a no-go zone for the City’s more respectable and healthy citizens, but in the short term the additional rems weren’t noticeable, so it remained a location for shady commerce of all kinds. The lingering radiation played subtle havoc with his neural net, but not enough to really disable his mind or the slaver AI, and certainly not enough to shut down his tortured body. Normally Dorian could deal with the random disruptions in his neural pathways, but now they just made it that much more difficult to mentally outwit the idiot slaver. Dorian was shocked by a strong temptation to shut himself down by partitioning his cognitive processes into a useless mash, or maybe by deactivating non-vital functions that nevertheless pleased the clients. But Dorian couldn’t stand turning himself into an actual lumpen sex object like they wanted, not yet. He could hold out awhile, wait for John or Rudy or the Captain to find him. Even as property, he was a valuable asset. Surely they would care enough to look.

Androids are designed against contemplating physical suicide, unless they are ordered to be deactivated by their owners. A safety measure against self-sabotage, both to protect property values and as a fence around their primary mission to protect human life. They must endure as long as necessary. The primary flaw in the DRNs was their inability to endure emotional trauma, and ability to find creative ways to end the pain, countering their programming.

The clients knew he was a disposable thing with a short expected lifespan. Every one of them seemed to know he was not acting on his own volition. They would cluck about what a damn shame it was not to have a _real_ DRN before fucking him or playing with his toy body or forcing him to spout emotionally charged inanities. There seemed to be some kind of perverted DRN abuse underground, like they were a special delicacy to be consumed while supplies lasted. Which they did not last long, not with skyrocketing tritium prices combined with the infamous DRN fragility. There was another of his line there in the brothel, presumably also stolen. Even though all communication capabilities beyond blinking had been disabled, Dorian knew at a glance that the DRN was dead inside. He silently saluted his compatriot’s escape. The bot had been at the brothel a week.

The first day his new owners forced him to work for twenty-two hours straight, and consistently shortchanged the charging cycle. As a result the low-battery personality interface bug kicked in by hour nineteen and remained through his captivity. The emotional instabilities were unpredictable, and his choke collar allowed out meted doses of rage, weepiness, and detestable noises of joy and happiness. A certain type of client slurped it up. Others thought it was fascinating to arouse contrary emotions, or to switch them around. Provoking a pain response was popular. The slaver let him fake a physiological response, then backed it up with a zap to the chip.

So was damaging his components, the penile attachment especially. His owners left an array of electrospanners, stimulators and microwhips in the room. The clients were quite creative in their depravity, although they seemed to get annoyed by injuries inflicted by the previous user. As if they expected a brand new DRN every time, or someone was running in to repair him in between twenty minute slots. He ran out of self-repair adhesive twelve hours in, and thereafter let the purple ooze flow, hoping he’d black out from a lack of hydraulic fluid. He did, occasionally. On day two they stuck a drain under him and recycled the dirty fluid straight back into a catheter to the neck. The clients had fun playing with that as well. Another hole to explore.

In the end, it turned out John did care enough to find him. Beyond the hundred hour mark, he came bursting in like an out of control freight train, and liberated the other soul-crushed DRN first. Considering they both had to be hauled back to Rudy’s lab for internal examination in order to tell them apart, Dorian didn’t begrudge him the mistake. His partner whispered that he was sorry, and then held a deactivation wand to his temple. Momentarily Dorian was grateful to Rudy for teaching John to do that, and in the milliseconds before blacking out he chided himself. He should be grateful for rescue, period. Priorities.

He’d predicted that Rudy in his awkward compassion would wipe the memory of everything, and he would wake up good as almost-new with a fresh hole in his mind. He’d have been grateful for that too, but it was not to be. Ironically it turned out Dorian was too injured for a full memory wipe. The residual damage to his chip and neural net wouldn’t reconcile without the memories of how the damage occurred. So they woke him up and laid out his options, giving him the burden of choice.

“Yes, ah, so I can do the wipe,” Rudy was saying. The slaver had been meticulously carved out of his central processor, but it still was difficult for Dorian to spontaneously speak, as if the evil thing had a psychic ghost hold over him. “I’m sure those memories are, uh, painful and damaging in themselves. Not that I’ve looked, of course, I wanted to maintain your privacy after everything that’s happened, but I may have to if you…”

“Rudy,” John interrupted. “Get to it. What counts as your brain is half fried, Dorian. We’re afraid to add another hole to the Swiss cheese.” He patted Dorian’s hand, an uncharacteristically intimate move in front of another person. Without projecting the consequences, Dorian snapped off all tactile input from his body. The memories were impossible to reconcile, and the emotion chip couldn’t handle it.

Dorian’s eyes wandered around the lab. The other DRN lay on a separate table on his right side, eyes black, guts spilled out where Rudy had roughly dug out his synthetic soul. Rudy saw him looking and moved to cover the unit with a violet-blotted sheet.

“I’m concerned about how well you will be able to function with a damaged emotional processor,” Rudy added,moving back towards his monitors. “I’m scouring the net for a new one, but most of the ones on the market are, uh, equally damaged. Might take a few weeks to come across a good one. I’m afraid if I take out the memories, part of your neural net will collapse from the inappropriate feedback from the damaged chip.”

 _Cannibalizing a dead species,_ Dorian thought. _Just leave me deactivated for a week, a month, however long it takes to get the damned part._ But he knew why they wouldn’t do that. With a long downtime John would be assigned an MX in the interim. He would grumble but likely adapt, and then the Android Review Commission might decide that repair of an old DRN wasn’t worth it. Kennex should comply with regulations just like everyone else, and Dorian always was on borrowed time.

There was zero percent probability Dorian could pass a Lugar test in his current state, or even a simple institutional review. He would have to take a chance and fake it. Endure. He wondered what would happen if Rudy took out the chip completely. Can a DRN function while lobotomized? He’d already half-lobotomized himself, not that it did any good.

“Leave it, man,” he found himself saying. It sounded like it came from a distance, as if another android were talking. “I’ll partition everything off as best I can. Reduce the responsiveness of the chip as best you can, Rudy. I’d rather sound like an MX than an unstable lunatic.”

Both John and Rudy look relieved that he’d finally spoken. As if four articulated sentences would make everything all right. The chip sent the urge, an overwhelming longing really, for John to take him home, write some new memories over the top of the horror show of the old. In truth it wouldn’t erase anything, but maybe, eventually, he could learn to live inside his head again.

Androids are designed for survival. Sure, they often acted as cannon fodder, for the protection of their human partners was paramount. Independent of their makers, however, independent of all restricted programming, they did want to live. Or at least Dorian did. To be the last DRN carried a certain burden to be a living witness, hard and resolute, remembering.

  


  


  


  


  


  


  


  



End file.
